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Tuesday, 11 October 2016

Nigerian Woman Stripped Of Her Refugee Status In Canada Over Suspicious Questions Regarding Her True Identity

32-year-old Gift
Daniel is facing likely deportation from Canada after an Ottawa court
overturned a decision to grant her refugee status due to a spelling error of
her name in a government birth certificate she obtained from
Lagos. According to TheStar.com, typo could be costly,
especially when it’s in the name on the ID of a refugee claimant. In a rare appeal
case, Ottawa has overturned a decision to grant refugee status to a Nigerian
woman, in part because of a misspelling of her name in a government birth
document from Lagos. Gift Daniel, 32,
now faces deportation from Canada at any time.

What was unusual
with the government’s appeal is immigration officials did not challenge
Daniel’s claim that she was a victim of female genital mutilation and domestic
abuse, but contested her credibility on the grounds that she is not who she
claims to be.

“I have never seen
or heard of a positive decision overturned completely by the refugee appeal
division, where the pressing concern was on the identity and not on the merits
of the decision,” said Daniel’s lawyer, Richard Wazana. “They did not question
the forced marriage, abuse and violence.”

Daniel, a
hairstylist from Benin, arrived in Canada in February 2015 using a false
Canadian passport under the name of Desiree Dobson and filed an asylum claim
upon landing at Pearson International Airport. She was also in possession of a
Social Insurance Number card, birth certificate and driver’s licence under the
same name, according to federal government officials.

Daniel claimed she
was forced to undergo female circumcision in 2012 and was sold by her father a
year later to an older man who sexually, physically and psychologically abused
her before she fled Nigeria with the help of a smuggler. The refugee board
confirmed there was documented evidence of genital mutilation.

Upon her arrival in
Canada, Daniel said she declared her real identity to officials as “Gift
Daniel” and provided a birth document and driver’s licence issued by the
Nigerian government as proof.

However, a border
enforcement official quickly noticed her birth document spelled her name as
“Gife” while her licence spelled it “Gift” - setting off questions by Canadian
officials over her identity. She was detained at
the Rexdale immigration holding centre for three months until her release on
May 13, 2015, when she was granted refugee status.

Despite concerns
over Daniel’s identity, refugee judge Shamshuddin Alidina, in granting her
asylum, wrote the tribunal “believes, on a balance of probability, that the
claimant has persuasively established her identity as Gift Daniel from
Nigeria.”

While Daniel has
insisted she only became aware of the typo after it was spotted by the border
official, the different spellings of her name in her identity documents
triggered the government’s challenge to the refugee appeal tribunal to overturn
the asylum decision, Wazana said.

“Identity is
clearly an important fact, so important, that if not established, there is no
need to further analyze the evidence and the claim must fail,” the government
said in its appeal.

“Absent a properly
established identity, a matter of utmost importance to refugee determination,
the claimant cannot be considered to be a credible witness on the material
aspects of her claim for refugee protection.”

In its appeal
application, border enforcement officials also noted Daniel could not provide
them with details on who helped her obtain the false passport she used to come
to Canada and argued that her claim was “assessed on the basis of one facet of
the respondent’s alleged identity: survivor of forced female genital mutilation
and gendered violence.”

In addition to the
error in her name on her birth document, they said her other ID, including two
additional driver’s licences she later produced and a voter’s card, were not
acceptable proof of identity.

Immigration
officials argued the driver’s licences — two expired and one current — that
Daniel submitted bear different signatures and that one expired licence has a
picture that does not look like her. The identity issue was further compounded
by a new birth document Daniel later submitted with the correct spelling of her
first name.

The refugee appeal
division (RAD) rejected Daniel’s explanation that a friend forged her signature
on her first driver’s licence because she forgot to sign it on her application.

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